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Bidding wars return to Boston-area real estate market


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I've heard from a reliable source that most of the recent property sales in certain parts of Allston have gone for more than the asking price, paid in cash (no mortgages), to overseas buyers.

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Foreign investors seeking to protect their assets from political turmoil (Middle East) bank failure or confiscation (EU & Cyprus) are buying up urban real-estate in the US.

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If they paid cash, I don't understand how they could know this unless the info was volunteered.

And what exactly are those "certain" parts?

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Property sales are public records. (Sales used to be published regularly in the Real Estate section of the Globe, for example.)

The GAP neighborhood is one area where this has been going on.

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The student-heavy Gardner/ Ashford/ Pratt Street neighborhood in Allston.

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you can go here

http://www.masslandrecords.com/Suffolk/

even if they paid in cash, a deed would still have to change hands and that would be documented.

I did not see anything that looked like that... but did not spend all that much time on it.

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Notice that the article is about "Boston-area".

I can't say with confidence what is happening in the city proper, but I can tell you from personal experience (my own and those of very close friends) that this has been going on for at least 6-8 months in some of the popular "suburban" communities (I express "suburban" as such as a nod to those who consider anything outside Boston-proper to be the suburbs, eventhough we UHubbers know that many of the city neighborhoods are more suburban than many communities outside of Boston).

Incidentally, the people that I've seen buying in these places are not "overseas investors" as we've seen so frequently in south Florida (and perhaps downtown). In fact, most of them are people who already live in the same community and are upsizing because they've recently had children after getting comfortable that the economic world is not ending as they thought it might in 2008-2010 (an agent told me yesterday that everyone who had come to see a particular house was moving out of a condo).

It's all about the low interest rates and the corresponding monthly payments. There's a big difference between 3.75% and 5% when you're talking about a 900K single family home. The new housing price bubble will keep inflating around here until rates go up (and since the Fed seems so hell-bent on issuing proclamations that that's not happening soon, things are beginning to look very 2006y around here).

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